If a pile of bones in a car park is shown to be Richard III’s, it will be time
to rewrite the history books blackening his name, says Chris Skidmore

On Monday, scientists from the University of Leicester will finally reveal the results of DNA tests on a pile of bones discovered in a Leicester car park last September and thought to belong to the long-lost Richard III, the last Plantagenet king.

The signs are promising. The body was unearthed in the ruins of Greyfriars Church, where Richard had been buried in a pauper’s grave after his death at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485. An arrowhead was lodged in the skeleton’s back, while the skull seems to have suffered massive trauma, possibly akin to the treatment that sources tell us Richard was dealt: his helmet beaten into his brains. Yet perhaps the most alluring clue as to the skeleton’s identity is the noticeable curvature of its spine. Could we have found the most reviled king in English history, the stuff of Shakespearean legend, the crook-backed Richard III?

Now seems as good a time as any for reassessment of Richard. Was he really an evil monster?

For most of his life, until the age of 30, he had been regarded as a paragon of virtue and a brilliant general. During his early years, Richard had worked loyally for his brother, Edward IV, earning praise for his straight living (unlike Edward, whose debauchery was unrivalled) and concern for the plight of the common man. So where did it all go wrong?

There can be little doubt that the seeds of Richard’s downfall were sown in his decision to usurp the throne from his 12-year-old nephew Edward V, followed by the sudden disappearance of Edward and his brother Richard, the “Princes in the Tower”. The boys were seen less and less until rumours of their death began to circulate, and by September 1483, their fate was clear. While there is no evidence to prove the exact date of the princes’ death, they certainly went missing under Richard’s watch.

Even in spite of his treatment of the princes, Richard remained a much loved and popular king. Months after he had been crowned, the Bishop of St David’s, Thomas Langton, wrote to a friend that Richard “contents the people” with “many a poor man” being “relieved and helped by him and his commands”.

“I never liked the conditions of any prince so well as his,” Langton added. “God hath sent him to us for the weal of us all.” When news of Richard’s death at Bosworth reached York, the city elders recorded how their king “late mercifully reigning upon us... was piteously slain and murdered to the great heaviness of the city”.

Henry Tudor had become a strong claimant to the throne after promising to marry Elizabeth of York, thereby uniting the Houses of Lancaster and York. As Henry grew ever stronger, Richard knew that confrontation was inevitable. When Tudor landed in Pembrokeshire from France, where he’d been gathering forces and equipment, Richard celebrated, believing victory would finally demonstrate that God was on his side. He had 15,000 men, whereas Henry’s army was less than half the size. Yet on the day, half of Richard’s army refused to fight.

When the king saw the treachery unfolding he was urged to flee, but flatly refused. “This day I will die as a King or win,” he is reported to have stated. Spying Henry Tudor with only a few men around him, Richard donned his crown and charged, his battle axe held high. He killed Henry’s standard bearer and was in touching distance of his rival when Sir William Stanley, who had sat out the battle, charged against him, sweeping Richard into a marsh where he was hacked down and killed. His final words were, apparently: “Treason! Treason!”

As his last moments demonstrate, Richard was a formidable fighter, hardly in keeping with his reputation as a hunchback. The first description of Richard being physically deformed comes from the Warwickshire chronicler John Rous, who might be considered the first author of Richard’s “black legend”. Rous also declared that Richard had been “retained within his mother’s womb for two years, emerging with teeth and hair to his shoulders”. It was perhaps all too convenient to speak ill of the dead while currying favour with the new Tudor regime. While Richard was still alive Rous had praised him, and it was only after his death that the account was suddenly altered. It was the same with paintings. The earliest surviving portrait of Richard shows no sign of a hunchback (admittedly, it may have flattered him a bit), and

X-rays of later portraits reveal that a hunch has been added to fit the popular imagination of the king.

Richard became the target of a political smear campaign as the new Tudor dynasty sought to tarnish his reputation. Its version of events was first set down by Henry VII’s official historian, the Italian Polydore Vergil. It was Vergil who, despite not arriving in England until 1502, spoke with members of Henry’s court to write his one-sided history blackening Richard’s name as a sinner. Around the same time, Thomas More wrote his History of King Richard III, one that is very much with us today, describing the king as being “little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right”.

The Tudors were the first dynasty to understand that history was written by the winners, and could be just as effective as weapons in winning the battle for hearts and minds. In many ways, the campaign was a massive success. The familiar image of Richard III as a bloodthirsty crook-backed tyrant has been handed down to us by one of the greatest men of the Tudor era, William Shakespeare, in his history play Richard III. Shakespeare essentially bought into the Tudor version of events. And still to this day, some of the material included in Vergil and More is all that we have to go on: a salutary reminder that history is not merely the study of the past, but what remains of it.

Richard reigned for only two years and two months, yet his legacy remains hugely significant for English history. Without Richard, there would have been no Tudor dynasty, no Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. England would have remained part of the Roman Catholic Church and the dissolution of the monasteries would not have taken place.

Now, with the possible discovery of his remains, one final question remains: how should we treat them? Competing claims that he should be buried in Leicester, Westminster Abbey, or at York Minster seem to have been settled, with Leicester cathedral being appointed as the king’s final resting place.

Should Richard be given full Catholic rites, as he would have recognised in his own times? Then there is the thorny issue of whether he should be given a state funeral, like any other anointed monarch.

If the bones turn out to be Richard’s, all of these questions will need an answer: but perhaps, in granting him a suitable burial, we can also put to rest the Tudor myth of this monstrous tyrant king.

'Bosworth’ by Chris Skidmore (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, published on April 23) is available to pre-order from Telegraph Books at £18 + £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk